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Cosmologists Find Eleven Runaway Galaxies
An anonymous reader writes: Discovery News reports that 11 homeless galaxies have been identified by Igor Chilingarian, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Moscow State University, and his fellow astronomers. "The 11 runaway galaxies were found by chance while Chilingarian and co-investigator Ivan Zolotukhin, of the L'Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie and Moscow State University, were scouring publicly-available data (via the Virtual Observatory) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the GALEX satellite for compact elliptical galaxies."
I guess the government needs to do something about this
Wait, why would that be confusing?
1000 times larger is : size times 1000
1000 times smaller is : size times 1 / 1000
No, it's not. 1000 times larger is size times 1001.
Time to call out the truant black hole...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
One of the things that always bothered me about this is the ambiguity of the approximation as well. Two interpretations:
More than 500 times but less than 1500 times, using the interpretation Parent suggests, suggests ratios of 0.00067-0.00200.
More than a ratio of 0.0005 but less than a ratio of 0.0015, suggests 667-2000 times.
How much overlap is there between these two ranges? 55.5% (667-1500) of the total range (500-2000) is overlap. The same is true for writing it as ratios: the range from 0.00067-0.00150 is 55.5% of 0.0005-0.0020.
This is tangentially related to why getting 40% off from someone charging 50% over MSRP is better than buying at MSRP. Without thinking about it, one might expect to spend 10% more in the first case (50% - 40% = 10%), but they're actually saving 10% instead (1.5 * 0.6 = 0.9).
Also, what would it mean if they were one time smaller than our galaxy (instead of a thousand times smaller)? How big would they be?
Until now I hadn't realized that there are actually people out there RIGHT THIS MINUTE who are several times more bored than I am. (Not, upon pain of death, to be confused with "several times as bored", or, God forbid, "several times less interested".
It's a shame that Del Shannon isn't with us any more, because he'd have the perfect response to this news.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The "Runaway Galaxies" was the name of my garage band in the 70s.
You are welcome on my lawn.
When someone says, "The new battery is ten times smaller than the old battery," yes ... we can guess that part of what's meant is, "The new battery is a tenth the size of the old battery."
Except you're not guessing. There is no confusion that it might mean something else. You've seen this pattern dozens, if not hundreds of times before, and it always means the same thing.
The reason we have lots of vocabulary words, adjectives, and constructions is so that we can be nuanced and more precise in simple communication.
Yes, English has many nuanced words, but smaller is not one of them. It means comparatively small. It is one of the more basic and common words, and has a simple meaning.
you're communicating that the old battery is small,
No, you're not. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to say something like, "The Small Magellanic Cloud is the smaller of the two Magellanic Clouds," without implying it is smaller than a breadbox or even small in general.
It's no different than people who say, "I could care less," when they mean exactly the opposite
It is very different from that phrase. That phrase has a literal meaning exactly opposite the intended meaning. The phrase "ten times smaller" doesn't have multiple interpretations (unless contorting things as GP said). Even if we ignore that, and take your meaning that it implies both items are small for some reason, that is still not the opposite of saying one is not as large as the other.
Fine, you don't like the wording. But you're trying pretty hard to post hoc rationalize a justification instead of just admitting you don't like it... then you run with it and project what that must about people who don't share your dislike.
There is no confusion that it might mean something else.
Yes, there IS confusion. Are we supposed to infer that the thing that the new 10-times-smaller version is being compared to was already considered small? That's what implied, but nobody knows for sure because the person saying it is lazily using a common, and poorly thought out, construction that doesn't actually tell us that.
No, you're not. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to say something like, "The Small Magellanic Cloud is the smaller of the two Magellanic Clouds," without implying it is smaller than a breadbox or even small in general.
OK. But let's say you don't know how big the Small Magellanic Cloud is, relative to, say, the Milky Way, or Andromeda, or anything else. And then someone says, "We've just found a new galaxy, hiding behind a dust cloud, and it's three times smaller than the Magellanic Cloud." What are you supposed to gather from that use?
Fine, you don't like the wording
No, I don't like people conveying information in a way that forces you to go research something they mentioned without providing any useful context. When somebody cites a comparative size, but doesn't explain why (or if) that comparison is meaningful, then it's a waste of time. Especially when the communication is theoretically about science and/or technology.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
They could be bride galaxies who were about to marry the boy their parents expected them to. However at the last minute these runaway galaxies realized that there was another boy galaxy who could really make them happy, if only given the chance!
Oh, so romantic...
Just like every time someone says, "Product A is $2 cheaper than Product B," I have to guess that, "Product B is $2 more than Product A." Maybe we shouldn't have slept through math class.
Math doesn't help in the absence of context. If Product A is $2 cheaper than Product B, but Product B costs $10,000 ... does it really matter? That's a little different than Product B costing $3, right? Right. In real life, context actually matters, or you're just wasting people's time.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
That has nothing to do with the wording people are arguing over
No, that's EXACTLY what people are arguing about. You say "A is ten times smaller than B" when B is already understood to be small compared to something else. The implication in that sentence is that B is already known for its smallness, and A is even smaller. Except, people use that same construction even when B isn't considered small. They use that incorrect connotation when what they're really trying to say is, "B is big, but A is only a tenth as big."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
"Cosmologists Find..." makes a snappy headline, but TFA is right - the discoverers were astronomers. Those galaxies are far away, but probably not at _cosmological_ distances, i.e. comparable to the scale of the universe. The scale of astronomy is mostly << scale of cosmology.
Fiat Lux.
So what you're saying is, "B is already small, and A is even smaller."
No. The phrase "A is ten times smaller than B" is equivalent to the statement SizeA = 0.1 * SizeB. There is nothing in there constraining SizeA or SizeB relative to anything else, just the size relative to each other.
Fuck.
Now we have to give the homeless planets (mostly the dark planets) some sort of EBT so they have enough weed money left, after the rent, to go to the Littel-Wayn-eVerse..
Is English your 23rd language or something? Did you fail every lesson related to logic? Did you sleep through every language class? Your arguments make no sense to an English speaker. Perhaps you should learn the language before you criticise how others use it.
It's a shame that your own literacy is so limited, and that your own ability to parse the differences between words is disabled by a lack of vocabulary breadth. That's got to be frustrating. Or maybe not, since perhaps ignorance is bliss in some way, right?
... that B's smallness is important in what you're communicating, and that it's of note because A's size is even more so (small, that is). If we're not trying to convey B's smallness as part of the concept being communicated (perhaps B isn't really thought of as small at all, in the scheme of things), a different construction makes more sense. Makes for better communication: "A is tenth of B's size." We're still describing the relationship, but doing so without including words that suggest B's size is already considered small.
Saying that something is "ten times smaller" is like saying "ten times more small." The phrase "ten times" is a multiplier. It means that you're describing an aspect of something, and saying that there is ten times as much of that aspect. In that usage, the aspect you're describing and comparing is the smallness.
By choosing that construction ("A is ten times smaller than B"), you're deliberately focusing on B's size, and implying that the smallness of B is the thing that's being multiplied
That you don't have the cognitive and communication skills to understand the difference, or that you DO, and prefer to have communication dumbed down and muddied, and require more back and forth to clarify what you mean, says a lot about you. Which is unfortunate. That you think you have to insult someone else in order to feel better about it is just kind of pathetic, really.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
"Times smaller", "times less" and their ilk are terrible phrases.
I agree - but if i ever express that, nobody understands the problem. I'm glad i'm not the only weird one!
The issue is how small is it to start with? We can easily express how large something is - there are units for that - but there are no units for smallness. So if thing A is 10 times smaller than thing B, how small is thing B? You can tell me how big it is, but you can't tell me how small it is.
Yeah, we all know what it means - but that doesn't make the illogicalness of it grate any less.
There is nothing in there constraining SizeA or SizeB relative to anything else, just the size relative to each other.
No, no constraints in that sense. Just the larger constraints introduced by the fact that the purpose of saying anything at all, in that context, is to communicate something meaningful about A's size. And by choosing the "ten times more" construction, part of what you're communicating is the fact that B, the thing to which you're comparing A, is by implication already considered small. That format (rather than saying, "A is a tenth B's size") is a choice of words that communicates the understand that B is small, and A is even more small. The phrase "ten times smaller" is using the word "smaller" in the sense of "more small."
The words "ten times" is a multiplier. It's used, in a comparison, to say that one value is LARGER than another. In this usage, the smallness of A is ten times larger than the smallness of B. Trotting out that multiplier is a deliberate choice made to focus on smallness in both A and B, with A having ten times more of it. That doesn't describe the size of B, but it communicates that notion that B is already - in the scheme of things - considered small, and A more so.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Wait, why would that be confusing?
It's not confusing, it's illogical.
Where do you get that b is small? All you have is a relative size comparison. It infers nothing about the size of B.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Man, I'm not even any of those other AC's, but you need to let it go or learn english. So you had to look up some common knowledge - everyone has a brain fart once in awhile, but all you're proving here is that either:
a) you're intellect is ten times smaller than the average persons
or
b) the average persons ego is ten times smaller than yours.
I get it. It's just too much trouble for you to choose between multiple ways of saying something in order to be succinct instead of vague. People who don't value clarity never realize that they people they're talking to - every time that happens - value that communication (and the person attempting it) less and less over time.
What's so hard to understand? This forum is full of people correcting others' poor use of communication when talking about everything from natural selection to global warming to employment demographics. Someone makes a sloppy choice of phrase, and the simple thing they're trying to convey turns into a four-step back and forth during which everyone from trolls to the merely dim decide to screw up the thread or just rant because the OP couldn't trouble themselves to just speak clearly in the first place.
This particular lapse in clarity, which comes up regularly in lazy science and technology reporting, isn't the point. The larger point is the grinding erosion in careful communication, and the erosion in clear and critical thinking of which that is an indicator. You think this is about ego? It's about understanding the power and value of properly nuanced communication, especially in the shortened format that venues like this tend to encourage.
I need to learn English? What you're really saying is, I need to forget English, because it's just too much trouble to quickly sort through the differences found in several ways to say the same thing, each of which contributes to a more quickly digested communication of different ideas. You're cranky because I'm not a fan of lazy thinking, and the fact that you think "learning English" means forgetting how to distinguish between different words is exactly the larger problem I'm pointing out.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.